Extending the Tabe, Expanding the Cold War

     In 1950, "a notice turned up in the New Yorker's gossipy "Talk of the Town" section" that criticized how scientists were naming elements like berkelium, after Berkeley, and californium, after California. The same scientists had even outdone the supernova by creating more than the natural 92 elements. One scientist, named Glenn Seaborg, created the first transuranic element, neptunim, along with colleague Edwin McMillan. McMillan finally realized that element 93 might decay into element 94. However, soon after he was sent to work on scientific military projects, leaving Seaborg alone with everything. So, he joined up with a colleague and created element 94, plutonium, based on how McMillan had planned to complete the task. Seaborg was then summoned to Chicago in 1942 for the Manhattan Project. Afterwards, he joined up with technician Al Ghiorso and together they "discovered more elements than anyone in history and extended the periodic table by almost one-sixth." They did this by bombarding plutonium with radioactive particles - alpha particles made up of two protons and two neutrons. They discovered americium, curium, berkelium, californium, einsteinium, and fermiun. When finding element 101, they had difficulties getting a large enough sample of number 99 to spray with alpha particles. After they achieved this, they had to look at what was left over after the atoms disintegrated. To detect the element, they had to run the sample to another lab miles away. After countless times, their strategy finally worked and they detected an exploding atom of element 101. They named it mendelevium and they also found element 102, nobelium, and 103, lawrencium.
     At this point, the elements were getting to big and 'uneasy' to get shot with alpha particles. Scientists from Russia tried fusing lighter elements together, after a lot of time was spent on calculating the best pairs to experiment with. Finally, Russia beat the team of Seaborg and Ghiorso to creating element 104. Seaborg and Ghiorso dismissed the results as "premature and sketchy" and they created 104 themselves. By 1969 they had it created, but by then Russia had already created 105. Both teams eventually go on the same level and created element 106 in 1974, just months apart. Then, each team started naming their own elements, a dispute that lasted until the 1990s. At this point, a point a team from West Germany had started claiming new elements. Finally, the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry stepped in to arbitrate. After nine scientists were sent to each lab to investigate, they announced each team had to share credit for the elements (the same men who named elements 104-109.) Berkeley was angered they deleted seaborgium (106) from the list and protested it to change. When the final list came out it consisted of rutherfordium (104), dubnium (105), seaborgium (106), borhium (107), hassium (108), and meitherium (109).
     By the 1990s, Berkeley was lagging behind and after the Germans got elements 110, 111, and 112, Berkeley hired a Bulgarian named Victor Ninov away from the Germans. He had claimed to have made element 118 while working for Berkeley, but when it got out that he supplied false information, he was fired. However, in 1006, "an international team announced that after smashing ten billion billion calcium atoms into a californium target, they had produced three atoms of element 118." It still has to be proven, but there's no reason to think it won't hold up.

The following picture is of Glenn Seaborg pointing to the element named after him, element 106.

 

Completing the Table with a Bang

     Despite what we think, some elements on the table have gone extinct and we only know what they are because scientists "developed new fields that let them create elements on their own." They soon found out that the making and breaking of atoms was more intimately bound than anyone expected.
     The whole story started at the University of Manchester in England before World War I. One scientist there, Henry Moseley, was drawn to physical sciences. He eventually developed a relation "between the wavelength of X-rays, the number of protons an elements has in its nucleus, and the element's atomic number." He also helped solve the riddle of the atomic number by using physics. He equated the positive charge with the atomic number by doing an experiment nobody could reproduce, and this helped scientists believe in the atomic nucleus. He found gaps in the table and numbers 43, 61, 72, and 75. Sadly, however, he enlisted in the king's army and died at age 27. To pay tribute to him, scientists sought to identify the missing elements he predicted. Element safaris produced hafnium, protactinium, and technetium, while elements 85 and 87 were produced in the lab. Only element 61 remained undiscovered by 1940. It was finally discovered by three scientists from Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee around 1949 by sifting through some spend uranium ore. But by this time, the enthusiasm died down because the enormity of nuclear science had changed- people had seen things. For example, Otto Hahn had experimented on fission- the splitting of an uranium atom. The field of radioactivity was being developed. At this point, scientists were very frustrated with the periodic table and explaining isotopes and the features of alpha and beta decay. Finally, everything made sense when, in 1932, James Chadwick discovered neutral neutrons. The neutron helped explain isotopes and how alpha decay and beta decay worked. It was used to probe atomic innards. Soon, a new type of radioactivity was induced- a chain reaction. With all this and the possibility of an atomic bomb, and a world war starting, scientists didn't spend a lot of time looking for promethium- the last element.
     Eventually, it was discovered and the atomic bomb was made. And this marked the start of a whole new science.

Elements in Times of War

     Surprisingly, the elements have been greatly involved in wars; some more than others. Some have been used in war as much as any other weapon. Strategies have gone from smoking cities to using machine guns. When the Hague Convention of 1899 banned chemical based weapons, militaries worked secretly on chemicals, especially bromine. This elements shreds weaker elements to get its eight valence electrons, and it can irritate the eyes and nose. Chemists developed bromine-based lacrimators that could incapacitate a man by 1910. To test it, "the French government collared a ring of Parisian bank robbers with ethyl bromoacetate in 1912," and soon their neighbors found out. In August of 1914, war broke out and bromine shells were lobbed at German troops, but they had little immediate effect.
     A German chemist, Fritz Haber, worked to convert the nitrogen in air into an industrial product, NH3 (also known as ammonia, the "precursor of all fertilizers.") But the real reason he did this was to help Germany make nitrogen explosives. When they finally made and tested shells on the British army, they were made ineffective by the wind. To fix this, and us a loophole they found to the Hague pact, Germany created "shells that delivered shrapnel and gas" by 1915. It was called weisskreuz, or "white cross," and it was first used on Russia, but the xylyl bromine froze solid.
     After so much failure, Haber moved on to chlorine, which changes skin color, glasses over eyes with cataracts, and causes fluid to buildup in the lungs. Chlorine was used to create grunkreuz (green cross), blaukreuz (blue cross), and gelbkreuz (yellow cross), which were all used in the first successful gas attack in history, led by Haber.
     **As a side note, Haber's wife disapproved of his research. When he stopped home before leaving to launch more attacks, Clara (his wife), went out in the garden and shot herself. Haber, of course, did not let this inconvenience him or stop his attacks. He left as planned without planning a funeral - what a jerk!
     After the whole bromine-gas-mess, during World War 1, the German military began to experiment with using molybdenum and tungsten. In fact, the most remote battle occurred at a molybdenum mine in Colorado. Molybdenum has been used to strengthen Germany's Big Berthas ("a suite of superheavy siege guns that battered soldiers' psyches as brutally as they did the trenches of France and Belgium.") It was able to to withstand the excessive heat that ruined the weapons. It was also used in Japan to make the island's most coveted Samurai swords - they never dulled or cracked.
     Eventually, molybdenum was superseded in steel production by tungsten. Its symbol, W, comes from the German name for the metal, wolfram. Nazi Germany so desperately wanted tungsten to use when making armor-piercing missiles and machinery. They traded with Portugal, who also fed the German's appetite of tungsten. It is one of the hardest metals know.
    Nevertheless, these two metals are not the only ones that have a niche. In fact, many weren't found since about 1950. Gadolinium, for example, is used for MRIs. Neodymium helps create powerful lasers. Scandium was used to make lightweight helicopters. Two elements, tantalum and niobium, "were named after two Greek mythological characters know for great suffering." (Long story short, Niobe was slaughtered and "Tantalus had to stand for all eternity up to his neck in a river with a branch loaded with apples dangling above his nose.") Both are dense, heat-resistant, noncorrosive, and can hold a charge well. These qualities make the metals desirable for compact cell phones. The Democratic Republic of Congo in central Africa holds 60% of the worlds' supply of the two metals. When people found out it was easy to mine these metals, many farmers ditches their farms to gain a fortune. Soon people had to hunt gorillas for meat, which virtually wiped them out. Once all phone makers realized what was happening, they started buying from Australia, even though it was more expensive. Tin was another element that caused fighting in Congo. For these reasons, Congo is called "the vilest scramble for loot that ever disfigured the history of human conscience." More than five million people have died in Congo since the mid-1990s, which is the largest amount of deaths since World War II.
   
     Amazing how something like an element can lead to a war in a country? This periodic table sure has caused many problems! But that's not to detract from all the good it has caused in the world!

Where Atoms Come From: "We Are All Star Stuff"

     Over the years, there have been many theories about where elements come from. Some said elements "just are." Others relied on the big bang theory. Goeffrey Burbidge, Maragret Burbidge, William Fowler, and Fred Hoyle all worked to "explain the theory of stellar nucleosynthesis in a famous 1957 paper" known as B2FH. This whole paper accounts for the elements up to iron, the "final peal of a star's natural life" in one explanation of stars and how they function.Then it says the elements from cobalt to uranium were created, or emerged, from mini versions of the big-bang. A supernova also creates new elements, after it explodes and neutron-coated iron nuclei decay back into protons.
    Many stars have gone through this process in other galaxies and even in our own. It is believed that one of these explosions created our solar system. Planets formed when dust particles and the spume from the supernova started to mix and swirl in pools. "The dense center of the cloud boiled up into the sun" and planetary bodies developed. Most of these planets have fascinating histories. Some were used to name elements, even if those elements do not make up a significant part of the planet. There are hopes that some planets have diamonds larger than the earth in a solid state. On a planet such as Jupiter, the largest planet, many elements exist in rare forms that aren't seen on earth. This is due to the extreme conditions on Jupiter. The rocky planets formed after the gas giants (planets like Jupiter), and they are a blend of many elements. As for the earth, Clair Patterson was the one who came up with the best estimate of how old the earth is: 4.55 billion years. He did this by analyzing the amount of lead in the Earth and using a lot of different information. (He is also the reason that society knows things such as lead paint and leaded gas are dangerous!)
     When Luis and Walter Alvarez were studying limestone deposits, they discovered a lot of iridium, which is rich in meteors, asteroids, and comets. This eventually led to the theory of how dinosaurs became extinct. However, dinosaurs were not the only species that went extinct. Thin layers of iridium-rich clay coincided geologically with many other extinctions. This new information supported the Alcarez's theory even more. Then, another element, rhenium, started a whole controversy on a companion star that supposedly flings rocks and asteroids at the earth periodically. This is what some scientists, such as Alvarez's colleague Richard Muller, believed explained the extinctions that occurred billions of years ago. This star, which was named Nemesis, has yet to make an appearance to scientists. For this reason, this theory is questionable.

     Basically, the sum of this chapter was, as Carl Sagan put it, "we are all star stuff." Stars were the beginning of our world, and they most likely will be the end of it, too.

The Galapagos of the Periodic Table

     Element number 33 is arsenic. Little was known about his element until German chemist Robert Bunsen started working with it. While experimenting with arsenic-based cacodyls, he got arsenic poisoning, for which he developed an antidote for (which is still used today). He lost half his eyesight for the later part of his life from an explosion, after which he stopped working with arsenic and started studying natural explosions-geysers, volcanoes, etc. In the 1850s, he settled back into chemistry at the University of Heidelberg and invented the spectroscope, which was limited because it was difficult to get the flames hot enough to excite the elements. To fix this problem, Bunsen added a valve to adjust oxygen flow in the Bunsen burners. He also instructed people responsible for work in periodic law, one of which was Dmitri Mendeleev.
     Mendeleev is credited with creating the first periodic table, but in reality, he merely put it together and created a way to group things together effectively. One of his rivals, Julius Lothar Meyer, published a table around the same time. They both split a "prestigious pre-Nobel Prize called the Davy Medal in 1882 for codiscovering the periodic law." However, both greatly contributed to the table. Mendeleev understood that even if some traits don't persist, others do. Also, he knew how many elements smelled and felt like. He obsessively revised his table, and he predicted that new elements would be dug up to fill the empty spaces. (Most chemists simply left spots blank.) He was even able to predict correctly the densities and atomic weights of some unknown elements. This stunned many people, and he even named them "using the Sanskrit word for beyond: eka."
    Eka-aluminium, or gallium, was discovered by Paul Emile Francois Lecoq de Boisbaudran in 1875. He had been examining a mineral and saw never-before-seen color bands. Since it is one of the few liquid metals you can touch with your fingers, it has been used to mold spoons to serve in tea. Then hosts laugh when "their Earl Grey "eats" their utensils." (This practical joke has been used by many scientists all over the world!) However, the results Lecoq de Boisbaudran published did not match up to the predictions Mendeleev made, so he went back and checked his work. He found out that Mendeleev was correct, but not all the time. There were many elements he could not predict, such as the lanthanides after cerium. These metals tend to clump together, and they are difficult to separate. One chemist, Johan Gadolin was able so successfully isolate clusters of these elements in Ytterby, a coastal village in Sweden.
    The book also tells this cool story of one guy named Johann Friedrich Bottger. He performed a little magic trick of making two silver coins disappear, and materializing a single gold piece in its place. Rumors spread, and eventually the king of Poland caught him, and locked him up. Then he pulled a Rumpelstiltskin move on him, and locked him in a castle to spin gold for the king's realm. Since Bottger could not comply, he was subject for hanging. However, he claimed he knew how to make porcelain, which was very valuable in that time. It was said to stop you from being poisoned when you drank from a porcelain cup. So anyway, Bottger became an assistant to Ehrenfried Walter von Tschirnhaus, who was already assigned to work on porcelain. Eventually, they were able to produce porcelain, and they showed it to the king. Unfortunately, this made Bottger more valuable, and he was locked under tighter security. So, sadly, Bottger was in a pickle. But he still helped contribute to porcelain and his life story tells a great tale!

Near Twins and Black Sheep: The Genealogy of ELements

     One element, carbon, is a part of proteins. "The longest word to appear in an English-language document whose purpose was not to set the record for the longest word ever" does, in fact, describe a protein that is considered the first virus ever detected - the tobacco mosaic virus. Carbon is the backbone of amino acids which come together to form proteins. The longest word i mentioned earlier contains the names of 159amino acids, and each one appears in the order they appear in the protein, so scientists can reconstruct it by just using the name alone. Each amino acid contains oxygen, nitrogen, carbon, hydrogen, and a branch that can be 20 different molecules. Oxygen has six extra electrons, so it only needs two to fill its outer shell. Carbon, however, needs four electrons so it is very flexible with bonds. Since silicon is right below carbon on the periodic table, they share a lot of properties. Silicon, or 'silico', is at the core of the longest nontechnical word in in the Oxford English Dictionary (45 letters long). A compound it can form with oxygen, silicon dioxide, is fatal and is believed to have killed many dinosaurs when an asteroid or comet collided with the earth so long ago. It is also believed that silicon could be the base of life on other planets, just as carbon is on Earth. Some creatures like sea urchins have silicon n their spines, and some believe silicon could form brains as complex as a carbon-based one. However, there are issues of getting silicon dioxide into and out of the organisms (like how carbon dioxide is circulated through our bodies and produced in cellular respiration.) And since it is a solid, that creates so many more problems when circulating nutrients and minerals comes into play. Also, silicon wouldn't be able to form rings of sugars to store energy and it can't form double bonds. In the end, life forms made of silica wouldn't be able to grow, react, reproduce, and attack - everything needed for life.
     Underneath silicon, we find germanium- a "sorry, no-luck element," the black sheep of the column. It has been used to build "the world's first solid-state amplifier in December 1947 by Bardeen and Brattain, called the transistor." The only problem with germanium is that it produces unwanted heat, so scientists mainly tried to make silicon work. When an engineer from Texas demonstrated a silicon transistor, things changed and the germanium idea was dumped.
    Eventually, Bardeen left the field, and Jack Kilby soon arrived. He started working at Texas Instruments when all other employees had vacation. Alone, he decided to pursue a new idea called an integrated circuit, where all the transistors, resistors, and capacitors are carved from one block of semiconductor, made of germanium. This also led to the invention of the computer chip. Sadly, he did not get cred for his work until 2000, but that's more than what some scientists of the day got.

     I hope this isn't too long, and you get to read it. It is a long post, and things jump around a lot, but this book covers a lot of things about each element, and it is all equally interesting.

Geography is Destiny

     Sam Kean breaks down the Periodic Table of the Elements by stripping away all of the "clutter". It was 18 columns, and seven rows, and none of the blocks of elements are interchangeable. Seventy-five percent are metals-cold, gray solids at room temperature. Some columns on the right side contain gases, while mercury and bromine are the only elements that are liquid at room temperature.
     A guy named Plato, from ancient Greece, developed a theory of "forms", where all objects are shadows of one ideal type. One of these forms, for helium, was discovered in 1911 when a Dutch-German scientist cooled mercury until the system lost all electrical resistance. And then in 1937, a Russian-Canadian turned helium into a superfluid. Helium is an example of "element-ness" (part of Plato's theory) as it cannot be broken down and it has enough electrons to fill its outermost shell. We have a lot of our knowledge of electrons thanks to a scientist named Lewis, who "spent his life refining how an atom's electrons work in many contexts." He also changed the definitionof an acid from a proton donor to an electron stearler, because some substances act like acids without relying on hydrogen.
     After this new theory, scientists tried to see how strong acids could be. A boron-based acid has a pH of -18, although there are wrose acids based on antimony, an element with a very "colorful" past. Antimony has been used for mascara to help women give the evil eye, wall paint, laxaties, and more; all because of its "sexual properties." When they finally got a handle on it, they were able to mix antimony pentafluoride with hyrofluoric acid to produce a substance with a pH of -31. The strongest solo acid, however, remains as the boron-based carborane.
     Going back to the periodic table, as you move across horizontally, each of the elements have one more electron than the element to the left. On the left side, elements put electron in an s-shell, which only holds two electrons. Elements on the right side put their extra electrons in a p-shell, which can hold six electrons. Together these two shells add up to the eight electrons an element wants in its outer shell. Transition metals, the elements in the middle of the table, start to put their electrons in d-shells. These shells hold up to ten electrons, and they are often buried beneath other layers. Some of these hidden electrons may rise up and react with other substances, but most of the time they tend to stay hidden and cause some elements to appear identical. The next shell, the f-shell, "begins to appear in the first of the two free-floating rows of metals beneath the periodic table, called the lanthanides. This shell gets buried deeper than the d-shells and this makes them more like each other and they can barely be told apart.
     This system of electrons drives the periodic table. But you can't ignore the nucleus, the part of the atom that accounts for most of the weight of an atom. Maria Goeppert from Germany began working with the nuclues in 1948. She suggested that protons and neutrons sit in shells in the nuclues, just like electrons. Her nuclear shell model won her a lot of credit she had been previously denied.
 
     I know this is a lot to read, but it is really quite interesting if you're looking to expand your knowledge of the basic principles of the Periodic Table of the Elements. Enjoy!

Mercury

The intorduction of The Disappearing Spoon is all about the element mercury, and Sam Kean talks about how he first got interest in the periodic table when he was a child with strep throat. While he had a thermometer in his mouth, he talked and it fell out, the mercury spilling out all over. He became fascinated with it and how the molecules behaved. When in college, he continually had conversations with his professors, which is what was the most memorable to him. Once he learned more and more, he became even more fascinated with the periodic table and the different tales the elements tell. This is how the book starts out, and then it goes on to talk about each individual element and the tales they tell.